In the last several hours, reports have been coming in of a major Tumblr worm spreading quickly in numerous Tumblr blogs. The worm places a post with the headline “Dearest ‘Tumblr users”, and goes on to rant and insult everyone who ever owned a Tumblr blog, or a blog in general. A group by the name of the Gay Nigger Association of America (yes, that’s the name) has taken responsibility for the attack, claiming a so-called “anti-blogging campaign”.

The worm has infected major Tumblr blogs such as those belonging to USA Today, CNET, The Verge and Entertainment Weekly. Aside from the rant, the posts sometimes include a ‘GNAA video’ as well. If you see such a post on a Tumblr blog, do not click it or interact with it in any way. In fact, until the issue is resolved, you might want to avoid visiting Tumblr altogether.

Tumblr know of the spreading worm, and have recently tweeted that they are “aware that there is a viral post circulating on Tumblr” and that they are “working to resolve the issue as swiftly as possible”. They also advise that you log out of Tumblr in all your active browsers if you’ve viewed a post like this.

The post contains a threat to infected users to not delete it, or else their entire Tumblr account will be deleted along with it. Since the post is now gone from several major Tumblr accounts, this is probably false, but if your own Tumblr has been infected, the best course of action for now would be to log out and let Tumblr do their thing.

While it's not pleasant for legitimate blog owners, I bet those emo teenagers were having quite a shock reading that statement. Hate me, but there are enough 'my life is worthless' blogs in the blogosphere (or their sisters 'I wish my life is fun but it isn't so I'll rant here all day' or 'Bet you wanna see everything I do' kinds of blogs)

I've just read the source article, where it states the issue has already been solved. Now I'd like to know, how did it happen? How does a Tumblr user protect his/her account from this kind of attack? Could it spread to other sites?

Yes, it was solved rather rapidly, fortunately, but it was unpleasant while it lasted. I think these vulnerabilities are always unexpected by the companies that get hacked, and they hurry to fix them once something like this happens.

As for protecting your account, it's always wise to not interact with anything that seems even remotely suspicious, but sometimes its up to the company to protect the users.